The Retreat of Finnish

John Ilmari Kolehmainen

Western Reserve University

In the short time that there has been a linguistic contact between
Finnish and English in America, two significant trends have appeared. One, the subject of
this paper, is the gradual but inexorable retreat of Finnish before English; the other is
the wholesale incorporation into the Finnish speech of words etymologically English.l

The replacement of Finnish by English is refleeted, on the one hand, in the increasing
bilinguality of the foreign-born Finns. Formal instruction of the immigrants in the
mysteries of the English language was begun early; language schools appeared in most
Finnish settlements. Some of them were sponsored by such agencies as the Y.M.C.A. and
local school boards; others were initiated by various Finnish societies and individuals.
Yet the linguistic condition of the foreign-born Finns today is, however, less the outcome
of the worthy labors of patient teachers in the language schools than of forces operating
outside the classroom. The enforced use of English, broken as it may have been at first,
in all contacts with the non-Finnish speaking world; the cessation of immigration and the
weakened physical condition of the immigrant areas; the use of English by the native-born
offspring and their disposition to contract mixed marriages, - all these interacted so as
to duplicate on a more universal scale the results of the English language schools. While
most Finns have thus acquired the new speech in varying degrees and after a number of more
or less disconcerting experiences, their bilinguality is far from complete. Finnish
remains, by and large, the conversational medium of the immigrant; the utilization of
English seems to require the stimulation of necessity.

The retreat of Finnish is more graphically shown, on the other hand,
in the decreasing bilinguality of the native-born Finns. The blame for the lingual
retrogression obviously cannot rest with a generation which regarded the instruction of
Finnish as a too "precious responsibility"2 to be
entrusted to the home alone. The churches, temperance societies, and workingmen's
institutions assumed as their natural duty the formal inculcation of the mother tongue to
the rising generation through their respective Sunday and summer schools.
Practically all the youth learned, through one agency or another, the fundamentals of the
Finnish language. Indeed, the instruction at Leroy, Ohio, was efficacious enough to cause
the ouster of four youngsters from a public school for their insistence upon
"speaking Finnish outside of school, during recess ... contrary to the orders of the
school board"3; the expulsion led naturally to a
"Finn War".

English soon came to compete with Finnish. As the period of attendance
in the public schools lengthened and as the Old World culture deteriorated, English
undermined the youth's dominion of the original tongue. The rise of English classes in the
Suomi Synod (Ohio-Pennsylvanla Conference) Sunday schools aptly illustrates
this process. As early as 1916 a group of Sunday school teachers informed their pastor
that many of the pupils about to enter confirmation school read Finnish with great
difficulty.4 A few years later some children had managed,
with inconceivable ingenuity, to get into the fifth grade without knowing the Finnish
alphabet.5 Since the English language continued to make
further inroads, the Fairport (Ohio) Suomi Synod Sunday school was forced in December,
1922, to inaugurate the two language system.6
The "Fairport Plan", approved and recommended for imitation elsewhere by the
Ohio-Pennsylvania Sunday School Conference meeting at Warren in 1924, was a compromise and
temporary solution: while an English Department was begun with English as the language of
instruction, all reading was, nevertheless, to be done in Finnish. The advocates of the
scheme hoped in this manner to assist the stumbling youth and in time to bring them back
to the Finnish classes. But if the ultimate end was to defeat the introduction of
permanent English language classes in the Sunday schools, the "Fairport Plan"
has failed completely; since 1930 the English class has become a fixed feature of not only
the Sunday schools of the Suomi Synod congregations of the Ohio-Pennsylvania Conference
but likewise of all other Finnish churches in the Western Reserve. The proportion of
pupils receiving instruction in English to taught in the immigrant tongue varies. The
ratio in the Warren, Ohio, Sunday school is about 1 to 3.3; in Fairport (Suomi Synod
Church) 1 to 8; while at the Finnish Congregational Church at Ashtabula Harbor instruction
is almost completely in the new speeeh. The trend is unmistakably in the direction of a
greater utilization of the English language.

Thus far only the early portion of the linguistic history of the
second generation has been disclosed. What happened in later years to the small and
laboriously earned Finnish vocabulary of the youth who completed at the age of fifteen the
normal requirements of Finnish education? Did he increase his knowledge of the language;
or was he even able to preserve the Finnish that had been taught him? The answer is
suggested in numerous ways. English services - "to get the youth to church"7 - have become a regular part of the church program. The one
question asked of every ministerial applicant is, "Does he have an adequate command
of English?"; no longer, moreover, are pastors advertised for in the
Old Country press.8 Everywhere immigrant societies have
encouraged the founding of junior orders where the native born could use
the English language since "they understand it best".9
In truth, English has replaced Finnish as the natural conversational medium of the
American-born Finns.

No one will deny that the logical and unalterable consequence of the
replacement of Finnish by English is the ultimate extinction of the mother tongue in
America. The question is no longer "Will Finnish survive?" but "How long
will it continue?" The natural disposition of the first generations "not to
hurry the language question".10 The churches of the
Ohio-Pennsylvania Conferenee, for example, were given liberty to deal with the problem as
local conditions required but under no circumstances was a "sudden
language change"11 to be made. In line with this
general policy, Sunday school teachers were exhorted to make Finnish language instructions
interesting and effective as possible. Several youth organizations have recently declared
in their constitutions that Finnish was to be their official language but, more often than
not, the clause has been honored more in spirit than in fulfillment. In truth, the era of
spirited resistance to the encroachment of English has passed; the strategy of the day
calls for, and American conditions demand, the slow and orderly retreat of Finnish before
the dominant language.